Previously Discussed
Mattingly: Let me make a remark on thrust vector alignment. It is my impression on the circ burn and on the plane change that there was more attitude excursion than I anticipated. Maybe I was just supersensitive to excursions.
Young: Maybe thatÂ’s what the short burn logic does for us.
Duke: One of the pitch or one of the yaws, we had a little tough time hearing it on checkout.
Young: RCS?
Mattingly: Back in the Command Module when you checkout the minus pitch, the farthest away engines are really hard to hear.
Duke: We commented on that fuel cell on Trans-Earth coast - the cycling the flows back and forth, which was something the simulator does not do.
Young: DC monitor group, AC monitor group, AC inverters, main bus ties - all worked as advertised.
Duke: Nonessential bus switch; never got out of Main A.
Young: G&N power switch, cryogenic system, cabin lighting and controls, split bus operations, gimbal motor transients.
Duke: Before lift-off theyÂ’re better if monitored on the fuel cells. After lift-off they show up better on the batteries.
Mattingly: The cabin ran at 5 psi when we started, which is a little lower than some of the others have been running. At the end of the mission, it was running down at 1.8 on the cabin pressure gage. Which says thatÂ’s - both regulators were low or maybe the gage was reading low.
Young: IÂ’m not sure there wasnÂ’t a bias in the gage, because when we pumped the cabin up to 5.7, it looked to me like it was reading ...
Mattingly: We never popped the relief valve. If it were biased, it was reading lower than it should be. Once I got it up to 5.9 on the gage and didnÂ’t pop the relief valve, so it doesnÂ’t sound like a linear shift. ItÂ’s kind of interesting that the cabin runs that low since you got two regulators and both of them are set higher than that.
Young: Cabin atmosphere. Amazing how much methane that cabin can handle, although at times, we overpowered it.
Duke: Only momentarily.
Young: Call 2 hours momentarily? I guess it was momentarily.
Duke: I thought the water system, once we got the separator on there, was excellent. The hot water was really nice and hot and the food tasted real good with that hot water in there, stayed warm for 15 minutes or so. The cold water was real cold, especially when you got up in the morning to take a drink.
Mattingly: Or, if you went ahead and ran it out, it got colder as you drank it. I understand that.
Young: I think the only thing we noticed on the suit circuit is that it takes a long time for the suit volume to build upon the suit pressure test. You got to wait on it for the suit flow to come back to nominal value. In fact, on the EVA checkout, you ran a cabin pressure down in order to get the suit flow down.
Mattingly: The purge flow is under the cabin so that was one of the things that you can get a box with. That purge flow will to up faster than that little regulator can pump the suit up. So youÂ’re falling behind - you never catch up.
Young: That may be a problem that the Apollo 15 guys had when they couldnÂ’t pass their suit integrity check.
Mattingly: It could have been. It fits the sequence.
Young: ThatÂ’s what it was on their sequence. Ken thought of it right away. He dropped the cabin pressure, and the suit flow came right down.
Waste management system, urine and fecal disposal problems. LetÂ’s have at it.
Mattingly: Why not - itÂ’s a spacecraft problem as much as a medical problem. Take them separately because they are somewhat distinct problems. Fecal disposal. We used the black Skylab bag first. And we had it completely filled. I guess I really canÂ’t say that I ever smelled any odors unless you went and put your head right next to the bag; I vented it using the waste management hose and the waste management vent. Every time we did a urine dump, IÂ’d put a couple of minutes of vent, on the thing to try and suck the gases out of the bag.
Young: We had long periods of time where we werenÂ’t allowed to vent the bag.
Mattingly: ThatÂ’s right. We would go for 12 or 21 hours at times without getting to do that. The bag always had the appearance to me that it was puffed up, except for the times when I would actually go and vent it. Unless I was right next to the bag - my head within two feet of it, I didnÂ’t smell the odor from it. But if you got within two feet of, I think it did.
Young: Charlie slept within two feet of it the whole night long.
Duke: By my feet.
Young: On an operational mission you shouldnÂ’t have to keep that kind of stuff in the cockpit with you unless you can vent it to vacuum. You ought to be able to vent it to vacuum whenever you want to, to get the smell out of the cockpit. The rest of the time you ought to jettison it. You ought to jettison it at the most convenient time that comes up. I just donÂ’t think that guys ought to be wandering around with a bag full of feces in the cockpit.
Mattingly: Our concern was that with cabin depressurization, that the bag would blow up.
Young: Boy, would that have been a mess!
Mattingly: I vented the bag to make sure that the big bag didnÂ’t burst. That had nothing to do with the little bags. As far as I know, none of them burst. I didnÂ’t open the bag to find out either.
Duke: Fortunately, you canÂ’t really get an airtight seal on those fecal bags. YOIJ1TG No you canÂ’t, no way.
Duke: That probably saved us. They had 5 psi when we started; IÂ’m sure they went down. We filled up that black bag.
Mattingly: Then we put some more in the side compartment - three more.
Duke: Three. I did two entry morning and you did one the night before.
Mattingly: I guess the rationale for using the supplementary bag first was a holdover from the desire to be able to throw it away, which we werenÂ’t allowed to do for other reasons, but I really think thatÂ’s what you should do.
Young: You should have been in the LM when we got rid of it.
Mattingly: I really think so. And you ought to plan to get rid of the next batch when you do the EVA. I just donÂ’t think you ought to carry that stuff around, if you can avoid it. I think itÂ’s a health problem if you ever get some of that stuff loose in there.
Young: I do too. I donÂ’t know what data is going to come out of this, I bet none. For an operational mission you shouldn't do it. Skylab maybe a different problem, but even in that, itÂ’s going to give them trouble.
Duke: We had three types of bags.
Mattingly: The two bags are really more similar than I thought they would be.
Duke: The first time I had to go was right after waking up on the first day, after the first sleep period. Ken broke out one of those Skylab bags, and I tried that the first time. I thought it worked pretty good. I took the stickum off the little ellipsoid opening, and used the stickum and the Velcro strap around the legs. I didnÂ’t feel like it was tight enough with just the Velcro strap, so I undid it and pulled the stickum off. Once you performed the task, the clean up was still as horrendous as ever. I later found out that it really didnÂ’t help that any. ItÂ’s a learning curve on this just like anything else. Shutting the bag off was probably a little bit more secure feeling with that Velcro across my legs than with the other bag. I felt the positioning of the bag was easier due to the hard opening than with the Gemini bag.
Young: I made some study of this problem in depth, starting back in the Gemini Program. I still donÂ’t see any use for that finger in the bag.
Duke: That was one thing I was going to add. You want to get that finger out of there.
Young: Get the finger out of there to keep the feces from hanging up, which it does every time the fingerÂ’s in the way. All thatÂ’s going to do is give you a bigger cleanup problem than you already got.
Mattingly: I tried doing it the way they suggested - pulling the finger thing out first and then use it afterwards. All that does is smear. Absolutely no advantage to it. It looks to me like you could simplify the bag and remove one more potential weak spot in it by just deleting that whole thing.
Duke: Our technique was to abandon the LEB to whoever had to go, get naked, and go. That was about a 30 to 45 minute task.
Young: You got to take off all your clothes because we donÂ’t have two-piece underwear, which I think the Skylab guys are smart enough to have done.
Mattingly: In comparing the Skylab proposed bag with the standard bag, it seemed to me that the finger thing was better than the one we have now only because it was easier to pull out. If you deleted the whole thing, both of them would be better bags. I though the belt on the Skylab bag was a luxury that we donÂ’t need. I didnÂ’t think it did anything for you. YouÂ’ve got to have some sticky back around the seal. YouÂ’ve got to have that. As long as youÂ’ve done that, then putting that Velcro on there was just window dressing, I thought.
Young: What it does - it gives you a much bigger package to dispose.
Mattingly: And it has the disadvantage that the hard part that goes in your crotch there gives you something thatÂ’s very hard to wrap up into a small package when you go to stuff it in an overbag to stow it later. Given a choice, IÂ’d rather not have all that hard stuff in there to have to stuff into the bag later on. Just work a little more carefully and try to get a seal on the plastic bag to begin with. I thought it also made it easier to seal. Concerning the hard stuff, I was never able to get a good seal because of the rigidity of that plastic or whatever that stuff is. When you fold it up and put the two surfaces together, along the axis of the fold, there was always an air passage. You could never seal that completely just because of the material properties. The thin plastic bag didnÂ’t have that thing. I felt like you could get pretty close to a gas-tight seal with the original bag.
Young: You donÂ’t have the time or the ability in zero gravity to mix the dye in that thing. ThereÂ’s no way you can get those things all together.
Mattingly: I understand in their desire to make that bag so that it doesnÂ’t inadvertently break the germicide, or whatever that little blue package is. For me, one of the most difficult things was to put that thing in there and break that little bag inside. I was always afraid that instead of breaking that little bag, I was going to break the outer bag. You really have to push on that thing. Like Charlie said, youÂ’ve got to just take the heel of your hand and just really smash it. I always had visions of the big outer bag coming open when I did that. I really had a hard time mustering the courage. There ought to be a better way of doing that. Seems like you ought to put it in one .of these packages where the outer coating does like these pills do where it sort of eats itself away like pills do in your stomach.
Young: It would be more convenient, too, if was packaged down in the bottom of the bag where itÂ’s supposed to be. Every time you put it down in the bottom of the bag the first thing it does is float back out.
Mattingly: Instead of something you add afterwards - it ought to be something thatÂ’s in there with a coating that will come off when itÂ’s exposed to something in the fecal matter. It would just take care of itself. You shouldnÂ’t have to add a pill or a germicide or anything like that to the bag when you get through with it. The other thing that appears to me that no one had considered is the large amount of tissue that is required cleaning yourself up. These fecal bags are big enough to hold a bolus [?), but somebody forgot about all the tissues youÂ’re going to stuff in there. YouÂ’re not very efficient with them because you just take one swipe, and, if you got a loose stool, it takes lots and lots of swipes. When you get all that in there, then you go to put it in that overwrap bag. We had a couple of them that were really a tight fit. You either need to provide a different disposal or you just have to allow for it. There is no reason to make those bags real tiny.
IÂ’d like to reiterate my comment about the URA. At least the way ours operated, it needed more vacuum to pull the fluid in - to keep from collecting a bubble around the rim. Your best technique was to get close to the honeycomb. That would minimize the amount of splatter you would get most of the things inside. When I got through, and put the cap on it, there was always a ring of fluid that would - surface tension would pull back up around the side and get on the cap, and when you opened it up, out came a bubble. I donÂ’t think that this is unusual. This has been commented on before. You have to be prepared that when you open the cap, youÂ’ve got to have a tissue handy right then and there to get hold of it and do something with the thing. I felt like it was a much cleaner technique all the way around to use the bag with the roll-on cuff. Given a choice of all those devices we had, even if I could use it at any time, that the bag with the roll-on cuff was a much cleaner thing to do. You need lots of cuffs and lots of spare valves.
Duke: Yes, we only had one spare valve.
Mattingly: You ought to have more than one spare valve.
Young: YouÂ’re absolutely right. On an operational mission, you donÂ’t want to wake the other guys up if you have to make a head run at night. You got the bag with you and you can use it right there. If youÂ’re going down into the LEB at night youÂ’re going to have three guys up watching you go. ThereÂ’s no way you can get down in the LEB without waking up everybody.
Duke: Well, with the SIM bay, once you jettison that door, youÂ’re on the bag anyway.
Young: The actual performance of the system was nominal. We didnÂ’t have any blockages, although one tissue tanged out a filter - a short filter.
Mattingly: That was because we were getting ready to dump. We didnÂ’t see anything come over the side. We changed the filter, but it turned out we must have had the bag empty anyhow.
ItÂ’s one of those big white urine bags with a Beta cover around them. Those things are difficult to tell when theyÂ’re emptying because the overwrap bag is semi-rigid. You canÂ’t see the interior bag to know when itÂ’s all out. You kind of have to watch outside and see when it quits dumping.
Young: I thought the real-time test that we performed on telling whether or not the doctors could tell how much urine was dumping was really begging the issue. It indicated that they had little operational knowledge of what the heck goes on when you dump. The stuff comes out in spurts. it doesnÂ’t come out all at once. The line clogs up, and then maybe it breaks loose or something, but we saw it coming out sometimes in spurts. The urine is always dumped that way. The waste water was a continual flow, but urine seems to dump in groups, in a sort of a random manner. We were supposed to tell them when we started and when we ended. That meant youÂ’d have to have somebody down there who could tell when the white bag was empty. And as Ken says, thereÂ’s nobody in the world smart enough to know when that thing was empty. That took however long it takes a bag to dump, somebody on it full time. ThatÂ’s got no place in an operational mission. I donÂ’t know how you would tell even if you had somebody on it the full time. The procedure is to wait until five minutes after you see the dumping stop out your left-hand window before you shut the thing off. ItÂ’s a subjective thing because even after you finish, and you know the bag is pretty empty, that thing is still over there dumping stuff over the side. Where it gets it from, I donÂ’t know. From a line, I guess.
Mattingly: After we quit dumping, that thing would still continue to vent on the order of 10 minutes, a minimum.
Young: I just donÂ’t believe that for an operational mission that the guys should be saddled with measuring that kind of thing, testing it, and looking at it and carrying it around. ThatÂ’s a mistake.
Mattingly: I think itÂ’s important thing. Concerning what you do with the other trash that you have onboard the spacecraft, we use the jettison bags for a trashcan. We talked about that being larger than youÂ’d like to handle. The spacecraft launches with an awful lot of paper and bags, particularly the food bags and all that stuff. Number 1, you need to minimize the number of bags, disposable things that you take in a spacecraft because you canÂ’t open the door and throw it outside. Number 2 is that you have to make plans to handle all that. We jettisoned, during the course of the mission, all three jettison bags, which were filled just about to their total capacity. ThatÂ’s an awful lot of trash. We didnÂ’t eat all the food. If we had eaten all the rest of the food, we would have had even more trash in there. I donÂ’t think we have really paid enough attention to this. I donÂ’t know what you can do for Apollo except to be aware of it. Future spacecraft must provide a better way to handle that kind of trash. You need an intermediate-size bag thatÂ’s easy to use with a snapping lid. Either that or someone could make a snapping lid to go into the jettison bags so it would be easier to handle.
Young: Goodness gracious, donÂ’t let them start on that. No money in the world could build that bag. MATDINGLY That might be.
Young: It would be an advantage to have a jett bag that you pulled open, like that, with maybe a bungee in it - so that you put the stuff in, then close the bag and not have everything come back out.
Mattingly: You need some self-closing thing. ©2 absorbers - we had one that stuck very tight. Previous to that we had one that was a tight pull, but it wasn’t really stuck. The one that did stick - we must have worked on that thing five or ten minutes, pushing it in, pulling it out until finally we were able to break it free. When we got through, we set it side by side with the one that was clean, and there was hardly any visible difference.
Young: I didnÂ’t think Ken was gonna get it out. I really didnÂ’t. I felt we were stuck with a CO2 cartridge that wouldnÂ’t come out. It was that tough. HeÂ’d slide it back in and slide it back out, slide it back in, making maybe a quarter of an inch at a time. The cartridgeÂ’s stowed as ordered in the Flight Plan A6 or A4 - A6, I think.
Mattingly: I donÂ’t remember. Not A6.
Young: The second one inboard from the port side.
Mattingly: I really didn‘t know that there is a mission rule on that when one of those is stuck. It appears to me a prudent rule is, make sure the other chamber doesn’t stick, because if you ever get that thing stuck halfway in, you can’t close the door. There’s no way to open the door on the other side and you’re out of business. I really think you need to be ginger about it, and all the assurances in the world that you can’t break that little string are hard to swallow.
Young: YouÂ’re really torquing it, man.
Duke: Everything was fine. From my side, I thought the comm was great.
Young: The Vox was good.
Mattingly: The Vox was excellent.
Young: We didnÂ’t use the USE emergency keying.
Mattingly: Some time during the mission, the Sony tape recorder would not record and then later on it did. I think it was because you couldnÂ’t depress the red button, and I have no idea why or what happened, but I think probably something floating around in it caused the problem.
Duke: There was a failure that we had that we havenÂ’t discussed so far and that was the failure that we fixed by taking the Normal switch and going to Off and then back to Normal. I donÂ’t know what we fixed there.
Mattingly: I remember we did that a couple of times.
Young: Whatever it was, the ground said theyÂ’d fix it. They were having trouble with the up-link or the down-link or something.
Duke: Oh, they got themselves out of sync with a series of commands, and I think it was an up data link. We cycled the up TLM switch a couple of times and that fixed it. By going into Command Reset, it didnÂ’t fix it, but going down to the Normal position and back to Off fixed it. What that was, I donÂ’t know exactly, but they admitted a problem or two.
Mattingly: One of the things thatÂ’s been a perennial problem with Apollo - the warning tone in the C&W warning system is not loud enough for some people, and I happened to be one of those people that likes a nice loud warning tone thatÂ’s unmistakable. I think that our spacecraft was probably a little quieter than some of the others have been that IÂ’ve heard, and I prefer to have a tone booster on as a way of warning myself. Several times I saw the warning light and only then was I aware of the fact that the tone was on. That happened pre-flight, and it happened again in flight. I guess the rest of you found that the warning tone was completely adequate.
Young: It scared me to death.
Mattingly: I just didnÂ’t hear it.
Young: Especially when Charlie purged the fuel cells.
Mattingly: I have no mechanical comments. Everything worked like it was supposed to.
Young: I thought the mechanical worked well. The couch removal was no problem. We had trouble locking the Y-strut for entry.
Mattingly: Yes, we did, the Y-Y-strut on my side. We had to open it in order to get into 382, and I had a considerable amount of trouble getting the thing back in. When you got it in, IÂ’m not sure what you did to get it to lock - how you got enough room to twist it.
Young: I pressed the button real hard while you were twisting it.
Mattingly: Yes, I was really beginning to wonder if maybe we were going to make your entry without that.
Young: Yes.
Mattingly: I was getting ready to find something to wad in there so it wouldnÂ’t rattle so much.